


Introduction to Irregular (Love) Triangles

by Flymetothelostmoon (MissBianca)



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Angst, Annie-Centric, Established Relationship: Jeff/Britta, Falling In Love, Happy Ending, Multi, OT3, POV Annie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-09
Updated: 2015-05-09
Packaged: 2018-03-29 16:12:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3902569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissBianca/pseuds/Flymetothelostmoon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And maybe being enamored with both of them was torture. Maybe being caught between the heated gazes of two people that she couldn’t stop looking at was more painful than she could’ve imagined, particularly when at this point, they only belonged to each other. But Annie was too tired of the spring rain to cry anymore, and too tired of being closed off to keep stopping herself from looking at flowers or letting things blossom inside of herself.<br/>(OR: Jeff and Britta are in a relationship, again, and Annie is having a very hard time of it.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Introduction to Irregular (Love) Triangles

**Author's Note:**

> This is set sometime in season 6, or maybe between 5 and 6, and everything is the same as canon except Britta isn't living with Annie and Abed.  
> It looks angsty, but the tags don't lie.  
> I haven't written any community fanfic before. Actually, I've never really written a one-shot successfully before. So please, tell me what you think, leave kudos and what have you. I'm really not sure what to think of this, and I'm really not sure where it came from.

It was the last weeks of winter when they started seeing each other (again), and Annie was entirely too tired of being cold to pretend she was unaffected. She didn’t even bother with fluttering eyelashes or wide watery eyes - the damned Colorado snow had frozen her disney princess tears before she could shed them. And she was tired of crying over him anyway.

She hoped Jeff saw the anger in her eyes, and she hoped he knew he’d caused it. She hoped Britta felt ashamed of herself, because despite their mutually competitive spirits, Annie had thought that the older woman was above literally taking him from her. Not that he could really be stolen from her, since he was never officially hers, but it was the principle of the thing that counted.

The snow was piling up outside. Britta was in his lap and his arm was around her and her fine boned fingers were playing along his jawline, and Annie’s nails were digging into her fists and her sweater was entirely too hot. Why had she grown out her hair? Why wouldn’t it stop snowing? Why hadn’t she just kissed him before he ran back the safety of that beautiful bitch?

~~~~

It was two weeks before Annie could kick the feeling of betrayal from her tightly woven chest. It was another week before March could kick the chill out of the air, and a week after that before Annie finally felt herself begin to get warm again.

~~~~

“It’s a love triangle,” said Abed, his voice even, as they sat on the couch in front of the TV.

“What?”

“That thing that’s happening with you and Jeff and Britta? It’s a typical, perfect love triangle. It’s one of the most popular tropes, a staple of sitcoms, dramas, rom-coms, and just about everything else,” he said, tilting his head to the side. “Like Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett, and Kate Beckinsdale in Pearl Harbor, except Jeff is Kate, even though he’s really not like her at all, and it’s not about who’s available, it’s about who’s safer to be with, which is usually Britta, but I’m not sure which of the guys she is. Actually, Pearl Harbor was awful, just forget I ever - "

“Abed, I know what a love triangle is, and there isn’t one here,” Annie snapped. “He chose her, and he’s done it before.”

“Yeah, but only because she’s easier to be with,” he replied. “That’s why I used the Pearl Harbor analogy.”

“Tropes don’t happen in real life.”

“Tropes come from real life, Annie. Writers choose to use them in movies and TV shows.”

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” she said, crossing her arms. “I told him a long time ago that he couldn’t stay in the middle forever, that he either wanted me or he didn’t. I guess he’s made up his mind.”

“He won’t end up with her,” said Abed a few moments later. “You’re obviously the crowd favorite, and we’re much more like comedy characters than drama characters, so the only way this ends is for Britta to move away and you and Jeff to live happily ever after.”

Annie just shook her head and glared at the TV screen. Abed shrugged and went to make popcorn.

~~~~

After the first month of torture was over, Annie could finally talk to them without wanting to burn them both alive. She didn’t apologize for her reaction to their relationship. Annie was always resolute in her opinions, and her opinion on Jeff and Britta was that they didn’t make sense. Even though they looked at each other, they didn’t look like they were in love, or even really in liking.

She told herself again and again that she didn’t need Jeff, that he could hold whoever he wanted to, even if it wasn’t her. And she knew it was true, but it still didn’t click in her head. Because if Britta was the one he wanted, then why did he still look at her like that?

Annie wasn’t a kid anymore, and she didn’t have any delusions about the way that relationships worked. At this point, she was pretty sure that sweeping gestures and holding doors open and dancing under the moonlight were for chick flicks and trashy romance novels.

She tried to convince herself that she was reading into things, but then he was smiling that smile he saved just for her and calling her ‘milady’, and she was melting all over again and she could hardly resist the urge to grab fistfulls of his sweater and kiss the smile off of his face. She also kind of wanted to slap that smile away, because how dare he have the nerve to fix her with that stare when he had no intention of making the heat settling low in her belly go away?

(She opted for responding with her customary ‘milord’ and a half hearted smile, because really, Annie Edison wasn’t nearly as brave as she wished she was.)

It was another week before Annie’s anger at Britta melted into something more like envy. She was sure she didn’t want what the other woman had with Jeff, harsh words and lust, the kind that left marks. But at least she had him, which was better than Annie could say. After all the long looks and seemingly innocent touches that Annie and Jeff shared throughout the day, it was still Britta who had him at night. Annie’s fantasies weren’t all built on roses and holding hands, and her dreams were definitely of a more explicit nature. It wasn’t fair that Britta had gotten to kiss and touch him so many times, when all Annie had was two world-shaking kisses that had both been far too short and far too long ago.

Sometimes Annie found herself daydreaming about her hands tangled in Britta’s wavy blond hair, lips pressed against the other woman’s collarbone. It always threw her off, and she was left confused and slightly aroused (maybe more than slightly) and wishing that she could just sink all the way into her chair and disappear.

The only way Annie could explain those particular daydreams was to imagine that her subconscious was fantasizing about kissing the same places Jeff had kissed on Britta’s body. She wanted him so much, it was hardly surprising that she wanted to kiss the woman he kissed, even if just in hopes of tasting some of him on Britta’s lips.

~~~~

The winter had worn almost entirely out of her bones and the birds were singing loudly outside her window at five in the morning. Annie had been dreaming that things had turned out differently, his hands tracing fire along her skin, getting her heavy headed and drunk on his tongue. She sat up, grabbing a pillow to throw at the half open window, hoping it would make the birds stop screaming, that she could pick up the dream like half finished homework, go back to where she had left off. There was a bitter taste in her mouth, and suddenly the pillow was in her arms and she was crying into her hair, shaking with the wrongness of it all. Her seven o’ clock alarm found her curled into herself, still shaking, all of her tears dried out.

~~~~

Sometimes Annie found herself just watching them, together and alone - the adorable expression he would make as he scoffed at something Britta said, the way his scruff brushed against her jawline when he kissed her, the seemingly lazy way he leaned back in his chair during study group, energy coiled right under his skin as if he was ready to leap up any second.

She watched the way they hung on each other when they were drunk and lazy, slipping on their words and arguing less than coherently about something insignificant, like the potential cruelty of walking on baby grass (“‘s just...mean, Jeff...th’ baby grass didn’t do anythin’ to you...” “‘s grass, you...idiot...it doesn’ have feelings.”). The shape that their bodies made when they were leaning towards each other, the sharpness of their faces side by side.

There was something entrancing about the line of Britta’s neck when she looked over her shoulder, the feline way she climbed onto his lap, the sharp contrast between the heavy defiant way she walked and the sort of enchanting way the sunlight hit her face, making her look almost soft despite the definition of her cheekbones, as if she herself was the one glowing.

It was another ten days before Annie started to admit to herself that maybe thoughts like that about Britta couldn’t be explained away by her want for Jeff. It was almost two months into their relationship when Annie realized that okay, maybe she had loved Jeff for years (and still loved him), but maybe she was starting to fall for Britta, too. It wasn’t as if Britta was something off-limits or impossible to achieve, either - the older woman might not be a lesbian, but neither was Annie. That didn’t make either of them straight - they’d almost kissed already, after all. And now that she had admitted that she might be falling for the other woman, she started to notice the way that Britta sometimes looked at her, too.

And maybe being enamored with both of them was torture. Maybe being caught between the heated gazes of two people that she couldn’t stop looking at was more painful than she could’ve imagined, particularly when at this point, they only belonged to each other. But Annie was too tired of the spring rain to cry anymore, and too tired of being closed off to keep stopping herself from looking at flowers or letting things blossom inside of herself.

~~~~

“I was wrong before, this isn’t a normal love triangle.”

“What are you talking about, Abed?” Annie asked tiredly, looking up from her textbook.

“I thought that you and Britta and Jeff were a normal love triangle, but I was wrong,” came Abed’s matter-of-fact reply. “Before, when they first started dating again, Jeff was looking at you and you were looking at him but he was with Britta, which was all kinds of romantic and cliched. And then at some point you started looking at them together when you thought nobody could see, and then you started looking at both of them all the time.”

“You’re reading into things again,” Annie said, biting her lip and rolling her eyes for his benefit.

“When I made that bad analogy to Pearl Harbor a few months ago, I was wrong. I was assuming that you were all straight, because that's what most characters are. But now all three of you are looking at each other and doing a _really_ bad job of hiding it, and nobody else has noticed because nothing has obviously changed on the outside.”

"What trope is that, then?"

"That's the point - I don't know,” Abed said, leaning forward and looking at her over his bowl of buttered noodles. “Pop culture is _way_ too heteronormative for irregular love triangles where everyone is in love with everyone else. I've never seen it before. And now, you and Jeff ending up together isn’t really happily ever after because Britta isn’t just the ‘wrong girl’ anymore. She’s an equal third part of the equation.”

"I can't tell if you're excited or uncomfortable," Annie said, looking back at her textbook.

"I can never tell if I'm excited or uncomfortable."

~~~~

It was May and the rain was finally stopping and she was itching to touch both of them, dreaming herself into Britta’s hands as they gripped Jeff’s biceps and jaw, and imagining herself as him with Britta curled into her side, kissing her throat.

They were entirely too sharp-edged for each other, and the longer she looked at them, the more similar they looked. They didn’t quite fit together because they weren’t two halves of one whole - they were more like an old mirror, reflecting parts of each other. Annie could see the disillusionment in the world that she’d come to expect from Jeff in Britta, and she could see Britta’s cynicism in Jeff. They were both arrogant and opinionated and almost harshly beautiful on the outside. Annie found that the more she watched them, the more she saw, and the more she saw, the more she realized how similar they were on the inside as well.

Jeff and Britta were both damaged and had difficulty believing that they could really be loved - that was something Annie had in common with them, too. But they were different in that they didn’t really try to be loved. Annie had spent years flirting and twisting herself and blinking wide eyes first at Troy, and then at Jeff in hopes of making them love her. But Jeff and Britta were all about not feeling, not really looking, not really making any connection.

Annie began to realize that it was because they were scared that if they connected or committed to anyone who wanted to care for them, then everything would fall apart. They were terrified of being left, and so they clung onto each other because it was easier to be with someone who reflected their fears back at them, and because they felt safer with someone else who didn’t try to care.

Annie’s heart ached for them and she gripped her pen a little more tightly as they threw words back and forth at each other across the corner of the study room table, and imagined winding herself between them and softening their edges with gentle touches and reassurances, breaking down their walls so that they could actually see each other. She imagined them wrapped around her and loving her the way she loved them.

~~~~

The term was over and it was steadily getting warmer, and the first summer storm was building in the early morning sky, a clap of thunder that felt too close to Annie’s window waking her. She had been dreaming that things had come to a head, Britta’s eyes meeting hers as Jeff held them both against him and two sets of hands tracing heat along her skin. Annie sat up, startled out of her fantasies, and threw the sheets off her body, ready to get up and close the window in anticipation of the rain that she could taste on the roof of her mouth. There was another flash of lightning and Annie realized that she was not something to be toyed with, not by Jeff’s held gazes or by Britta’s. _(You either want me, or you don’t. What’s it gonna be?)_ The damp taste inside her mouth had turned bitter, and the sudden boom of the thunder shook something deep inside her. She was tired of sitting by and watching, tired of wanting and not having, sick of only being touched in dreams. Dreams weren’t enough anymore. If Annie Edison wanted something, then she got it, whether by working hard for it or by...less honest means. Jeff and Britta deserved to be loved, and they deserved to stop being afraid - she wanted that for them as well as for her own selfish reasons. And she’d be damned if she let those two beautiful people lose themselves in each other’s broken pieces.

~~~~

“Where are you going, Annie?” Abed asked, as Annie strode out of her room and across the apartment, a pair of rather uncharacteristic red heels matching the shade of her lipstick.

“To write you a new trope,” she said, unlocking the front door.

“It doesn’t really work like that. Tropes are - “

“Abed.”

Abed stopped talking at her glare, and watched her pick up her purse and open the door.

“Can I come watch?”

“No.”

“Will you tell me how it turns out so I can write it into a movie?”

“...Maybe.”

“Cool. Cool cool cool.”

~~~~

An hour later, Annie found herself standing in front of Jeff and Britta. It was a month after that before she found herself standing, then laying, in between them. As it turned out, victory tasted like a mixture of scotch and smoke, and while neither of her lovers’ vices were something she approved of, together they were more intoxicating than roses. Annie was drunk on the taste of Britta and Jeff and summer, and for once, she thought she would never grow tired of the season or the feel of the heat on her skin.


End file.
